Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (27 page)

In the interests of heading off any allergies that might form
in the absence of exposure, her doctors advised Jennifer to “feed him what normal people eat.”

“You have no idea how little I know about what normal people eat,” Jennifer remembers thinking. “Do normal people eat bread with avocado for dinner every night? Because that's what I eat.” She has no choice but to be brave.

“I just want him to be able to eat as many different things as he can. We've tried Ethiopian food. We've tried rabbit.” She pauses. “For me, food has always been associated with fear and death. He takes so much pleasure in food.”

“The only sad thing is that he wants to feed me,” she continues. “ ‘No, Mommy can't,' I have to tell him. We have a whole play-feeding thing now.”

Jennifer has another friend who has given birth to a daughter severely sensitive to many things, including seeds and dairy. Mom has no allergies of her own. “She can eat off my plate, but not her mom's,” Jennifer says of the baby they call “Jenny's baby,” as if the stork dropped her off at the wrong address. “It's a whole new thing to her.”

Like me, Jennifer wants to use her experience to help the next generation of allergic kids have an easier time. She tells people to use kosher guidelines to steer toward dairy-free desserts. She carries a translated note listing her allergies when she travels.

“I feel like I've accumulated a lot of tricks,” she says. “So much focus on feeding kids is about health. But there's the social side, too. You need to tell them, if you're out with your friends at a café, just get the French fries. You'll be fine with fries.”

I ask what her biggest concerns are when it comes to her son's diet.

“I'm more worried about him eating rocks and leaves and handfuls of dirt,” she says. “When it comes to something he's allergic to, I know what's going to happen. But eating a piece of glass off the playground—who knows?”

Food allergies are daunting. Yet with kids, she says, she has come to feel “there's way worse things you're going to worry about.” Her son is at an age when outgrowing his allergies is not only possible but likely. Yet if he still has his allergies when he is ten, or older, her perspective might change.

Another allergy mom who agreed to speak to me finds herself mulling over the future for her twelve-year-old daughter, who is allergic to tree nuts.

“I don't think she understands, at some level, how serious it can be,” she comments, describing how one day her daughter lackadaisically mentioned a reaction to hazelnut. The teenage years loom large. “I hope someday she gets to kiss someone—but she'll need to consider what he ate beforehand.”

Venturing into the world of alcohol won't be easy, either. You can never know what cutesy cocktail is hiding a dash of Frangelico or Amaretto. “It looks very pretty,” she imagines having to warn her child, “but the umbrella doesn't make it safe.”

In addition to sharing a tree-nut allergy with her daughter, her oldest, this woman is allergic to wheat (complicated by celiac disease), egg, and oranges. When she first got pregnant, she was determined to avoid passing along her problems.

“I stayed away from everything I was allergic to, plus all the
other common allergens: shellfish, peanuts, et cetera,” she tells me. “I had a spotless house. You've never seen anyone clean so much. Hardwood floors, no drapes. I made my husband replace the blinds so we had the ones that catch less dust.”

“I either did everything I could,” she says, with a laugh, “or else exactly the wrong thing.” These days, doctors don't recommend these tactics.

For her next child, she did nothing out of the ordinary, and at age eight, he seems to have no allergies. Yet in his early years of school, he refused to eat oranges or drink juice at school. Why? He had figured out, on his own, that his contamination with citrus prevented him from being able to kiss his mother when he got off the bus.

She does not keep oranges in the house; just the odor, she says, is enough to nauseate her. Her husband is not crazy about the ban on orange juice. He can empathize with avoiding foods—he had allergies to dairy and tomatoes in childhood—but he outgrew them, retaining only a few quirky sensitivities.

“He can't touch escargot,” she says. “The last time he did was fifteen years ago, and it was awful.” So her husband is in charge of cooking eggs (hold the snails) for the kids in the mornings, using the same designated pan each time, which he cleans. She has asked him not to feed eggs at all to their youngest child, a one-year-old.

“I'm worried that if he's not cleaned up properly, and I kiss him …” she lets the sentence trail off. “And he's not a neat eater. He's a messy eater.”

It's strange to talk to someone who has a worse variation on one of “my” allergies. The virulence of her sensitivity to egg
was brought home to them a few years back, when the family awakened one night to find a bat in the house—specifically, a bat tangled in her hair. Flailing caused it to attack rather than retreat, which is symptomatic of rabies; the bat fled to the attic before anyone could capture it for testing. So the whole family was subjected to rabies shots, which, like influenza vaccines, are cultured in egg.

“The first time was okay, the second time I felt sick, the third time I had breathing trouble,” she tells me. “The fourth time, I had anaphylaxis. By the fifth shot they had to give me a special version, cultured in human immunoglobulin.”

Unlike Dracula, wheat isn't known for dive-bombing its victims in the night. But it can feel like a bat in the attic in their house: a constant, hovering threat.

“I'm neurotic and obsessive about everyone washing their hands,” she says.

I ask what the biggest challenge has been. “The struggle is not seeing myself in my kids,” she answers. She has to remind herself that every report of a “bad feeling” is not proof of some new food allergy. Every day, kids get colds, tummy aches, fevers, not to mention cases of outright-faking-it.

“And yet I'm trying to be sensitive in a way my parents, out of ignorance, were not sensitive to me,” she says. “My dad was of the mind that if you don't vomit every time you eat a sandwich, you're not really allergic to wheat.” Apparently, he never got over his skepticism.

“He was a stockbroker,” she says, “not a biologist.”

On the upside, her father's refusal to recognize her condition meant she was allowed to do a lot more than most children with food allergies of such severity, including five-day trips to
YMCA camp. Now she sends her nut-allergic daughter off to camp with three weeks' worth of premade meals, which the counselors prepare using a separate pot and utensils, and two EpiPens.

I'm curious as to whether she's ever used her own EpiPen. I get asked this a lot, and my answer is “No, but there were plenty of times I should have.” So I ask her.

“I would rather stay curled up in a ball, drink Benadryl until the cows come home, and miss life for twenty-four hours,” she says, “than use an EpiPen.”

“Why?”

“Honestly,” she says, “I hate to admit that kind of weakness.”

“Me, too,” I say.

This is one of those things you're not supposed to say out loud. There is a legion of food-allergic adults out there who, year after year, buy epinephrine autoinjectors and, year after year, do everything in their power to avoid using them. At the end of the year, they expire. We buy them again. Again, we carry them everywhere. Again, we don't use them. Meanwhile we advocate for much more liberal use of EpiPens in schools. Recently, the mother of a nine-year-old with food allergies put me on the spot.

“Is it fear?” she questioned. “Does it hurt? What can I say to my daughter that would make her use her EpiPen?”

I tried to explain to her that the inhibitor isn't pain. A sting in the thigh is nothing when your throat is swelling shut. Maybe it's that Benadryl and breathing aids are largely self-metered. You can treat yourself—“miss life for twenty-four hours,” so to speak—and come back with no one the wiser. Epinephrine tips
that first domino in the line that leads to the hospital. Ambulance fees. Paperwork. IVs.

“But it's not the injection that is sending you to the hospital,” my friend insisted. “It's the reaction.”

“Let me be clear,” I said. “I'm not claiming these are the right things to do. I'm just telling you why I do them.”

I take this all back to my mother, wondering if she has a theory.

“It's a control thing,” she says. “It runs in the family.” Even an issue as serious as food allergies cannot trump our basic natures. She reminds me of the reaction I had when I was seven or eight, out with my parents and grandparents. On our way to an exhibit of ancient Chinese artifacts, we had gone to dinner at Hogate's, a local seafood place. Somehow my plate had been contaminated—maybe fried shrimp, maybe butter—and the roof of my mouth began itching. A few minutes into the car ride away from the restaurant, I had vaulted from the backseat into the front, so I could press my face against the air conditioner; a child's version of an oxygen mask.

“Your father knew how to get to George Washington Hospital,” she remembers. “Then we sat forever in the waiting room.”

This was when I had always remembered him telling me,
Breathe. Just breathe
. What I had forgotten was my grandfather the doctor, borrowing a nurse's stethoscope so he could take my vitals while we waited. My mother had called Dr. Latkin, my allergist, who prescribed steroids based on her report. My family essentially ran clinic out of the lobby. By the time they were ready to admit me, I was ready to go home.

“There was a risk to how we handled things,” she says,
admitting that it is sometimes one she regrets in hindsight. “I remember that reaction in Nashville, or that one to pistachios. You could have died. But we didn't want you to grow up with hospitalization after hospitalization. And the way you are now, so independent—I do think it comes back to that, a little.

“At least,” she adds, “I hope so.”

For weeks I've been obsessing over the ways food allergies come between a parent and child. The rejection of breast milk; the anxiety of a mother trying to cook foods she would never touch for herself; the hesitation of a child who does not want to give his father hives with a kiss.

But I have to honor that there's an intimacy being created there, too, one unique to any parent who manages a child's chronic illness. My mother, the diplomat. My mother, the (un) registered nurse. My mother, the translator of cries and bubbles.

If my child did have allergies, I'd know where I'd look for guidance. My mother, the teacher. If kids like Jennifer and I had blazed a trail, it's only because parents like her cleared the path.

•  •  •

“When milk was twenty-six cents a quart, my parents paid seventy-five cents for goat's milk, and then had to boil it,” a woman writes to me.
The Washington Post
had recently published a column I'd written about my dinner-party mango reaction, and she sent a letter describing her own experience with food allergies. Decades earlier, a prick test for sixty substances had caused numerous wheals to break out across her back. The doctor decreed that she could have no beef, pork, wheat, or
cow's milk—and most vegetables were rationed to only once a week, to prevent overexposure.

“If I had tomato juice on Monday, I couldn't have stewed tomatoes until the next Monday,” she remembers.

In an era when regular bread cost sixteen cents per loaf, they had struggled to pay almost a dollar each for loaves of 100 percent rye bread. Instead of hamburgers and hot dogs, they tracked down lamb and Spanish mackerel. Doctors told her parents that her allergies were probably related to living in Southern Florida, below sea level. So after seven years of no improvement, the family moved to Baltimore. In her teenage years, they decided to retest her, this time with 116 hypodermic injections.

“Every day for a week or so, I had to go downtown after school and get sixteen to eighteen shots,” she says. “I was so skinny that one of the needles actually went through my arm and dripped on the floor. The nurse was horrified. I just laughed.”

Incredibly, the tests showed no reactions to the foods that had once plagued her.

“I had either outgrown or moved away from my allergies,” she writes. “I'm sorry that you were not as lucky.”

Lucky
. Luck is a funny thing. Most strokes of good fortune are premised on being rescued from a stroke of bad fortune. The cat has to fall out the window before he can be caught by the woman standing on a balcony below. Nobody cares when a rich man wins the lottery; it's the winner who had been on the brink of foreclosure that inspires us. My family has always spoken of my good luck in surviving reactions, and never the
bad luck of having those reactions in the first place. Should I be bitter? Did I draw the genetic short straw?

When I was growing up, making those weekly trips to the allergist, the rhythm of Dr. Latkin's office never changed. We stayed with him no matter our health care plan, even when that meant periods of paying out of pocket; the continuity was comforting. We would arrive, sign in, and take our seats in the waiting room. On the floor would be the play set for the littler kids who enjoyed sliding primary-color beads along a series of loopy wire curves. The latest issues of
Highlights, Cobblestone
, and
Cricket
would be waiting on the low-set beech table. The walls were hung with posters displaying a collage of moments from Richard Scarry's series of Busytown picture books. Even when I last visited, less than a year ago, though the office had been renovated and repainted, the Busytown posters were still there.

As a kid, I knew Busytown from the Golden Books that my grandparents kept at their house. Richard Scarry populated his stories with anthropomorphized animals, often outfitted in traditional Swiss clothing: Blacksmith Fox, Stitches the Tailor, Hilda Hippo, and the Cat family of Daddy, Mommy, Huckle, and Sally. I use the term
story
loosely. Most of the books focused on indexing the business of daily life using the simplest of plot arcs (The Pig family is going on a train! Sally sends Grandma Cat a letter!), paced and labeled to show each step, crop, coin, switch, and gear that makes things happen.